How to detect the lightest glueball

Abstract

We suggest a procedure of the lightest glueball detection in a head-on collision of photons whose center-of-mass energy is in the range $1.3-2$ GeV. Recent evidence for the scattering of light by light in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider is used as a phenomenological basis of our suggestion. With this evidence, the cross section of the lightest glueball creation in the $\gamma\gamma$ collisions is estimated to be $\sim 60\,$nb. The predominant mode of the lightest glueball decay, predicted from the gauge/gravity duality, proves to be the decay into two neutral vector mesons $\rho^0\rho^0$. Because $\rho^0$ decays into $\pi^+\pi^-$, a drastic increase in the $\pi^+\pi^-\pi^+\pi^-$ yield is expected as the center-of-mass energy of the colliding photons approaches the value of the lightest glueball mass. This fact may be regarded as the unique signature of the lightest glueball detection.